Description
A recreation of the final battle from the episode Severed Dreams of the show Babylon 5.

Storyline:
The story line is something right out of Babylon 5, so if you've never seen that show, what happens in this mission might be somewhat difficult to understand. <p> The central Terran government has gotten corrupt and some of the outer colonies are declaring independence because of it, Babylon 5 station is one of the colonies succeeding. Needless to say, the central Terran government is a tad miffed and sends a fleet to force Babylon 5 back under their control. <p> All things dealing with the Freespace plot and universe discounted, it's a great plot. Although it could be better if it was somehow adapted to Freespace with the GTA and the PVE. <p> The briefing is complete, albeit a little boring. All the huge destroyer icons upset me a little. What, a mission full of destroyers? I hoped that they'd turn out to be cruisers, but turns out I don't have that luck.

Balance:
Weapon load outs are great, you can choose from plenty of every weapon available in the GTA arsenal at the end of the Great War, allowing you to custom fit all wings. Ship selection is also great, since it has enough ships to go around. On the down side, all the other wings (Including the rest of your wing) have default load outs, so you'll have to kill some time going through every single ship putting some decent weapons on them. <p> The enemy you'll go up against isn't difficult to thwart by any means, but the shear numbers might surprise you. Only Valkyries and Medusas are used on the other side, and the AI sits at captain, making it somewhat easy to take them down. Worse, all the enemy ships have default loadouts - Which means, with all the Valkyries flying around with just MX-50s and a single bank of Prometheus cannons, you won't be at very high risk unless you sit still for a while. If a higher AI had been selected along with better weapons for the enemy fighters, the rating for this category could be much higher.

Design:
The mission suffered in this category the most, since it has our age old friend: The Battle of Endor syndrome. Although many missions out there are worse, this certainly isn't the best. Four, count em, four Orion destroyers will be floating around duking it out until the last portion of the mission. To make it even more enjoyable, there's an Arcadia installation (Babylon 5), two cruisers, and bucket loads of fighters and bombers. After the two enemy Orions get sent to the great big scrap heap in the sky, two more Orions arrive! Wait, there's more! Soon after the two new Orions arrive, three Demon class destroyers join the fray (Playing the role of the Minbari, not Shivans). Now this situation would be terrible, and I would've given a much lower rating, but the two Orions leave shortly after they share a threatening dialogue with the Demons. This whole problem could be alleviated if there was one enemy Orion and one friendly, or maybe just a bunch of cruisers. Four Orions is just outrageous and unnecessary. <p> Another problem is that even though the messages are fairly well done, there just aren't that many of them, and several are far too large to fit on screen. The messages that are there get the idea across about what's happening, but during the action between the start and end of the mission, don't expect to hear much. <p> The way the author treated the breech pod concept in this mission is well done. In Babylon 5, pods carrying marines will strike the bare hull of a large ship, lodging themselves in. Not soon after, marines start pouring into the ship from the pod. In the mission, if the breech pod reaches the station, it will suffer severe damage bringing the hull down to 50%. Good job.

Gameplay:
Game play in this mission pretty much action packed. Although the AI and weapons are rather weak on the enemy side, you'll end up dodging a whole lot of fire and missiles throughout the mission (Unless you really like the color red). Be extra sure to keep an eye on those enemy bombers. If you ignore them they'll really cause some misery for the rest of your fleet. <p> Again, the Battle of Endor problem hurts the game play a bit because of low frame rates or just too much fire power flying every which way. Other than that, it's solid.

Other Thoughts:
Not much else to discuss.